A collapsed cake helped me become a pro.

..because it taught me humility. It taught me resourcefulness. It taught me being genuine. It taught me resilience. It taught me going the extra the mile. It taught me to move forward. It gave me courage to accept that failures are part of every journey and that I shouldn’t be afraid of them. And that’s what professionals do, they feed on adversities.

Sometime in 2016, we were on our way to deliver our 2nd 3-stack 1-layer floral cake. Few meters from the customer’s place, the stacks started to slide. We realized the cake was divided in half horizontally plus the bottom stack also cracked. It was not a minor division(and crack) that we can easily correct with a single spatula BUT it was a major “non-overhaul-able” kind of horizontal division that we can’t get the pieces back to its place unless we bake another stack to replace it.

Imagine that, being 10 minutes before the customer uses the cake to surprise a big boss at work. We reached the customer’s office parking lot and the customer was excitedly smiling waving at us over the car.

I could cry over a collapsed cake but crying was not an option that time. Instead, I went out of the car without the cake and approached her politely telling “I made a mistake, I’m so sorry. The cake collapsed.” Then, I brought her to the car to see how the cake looked like. The top was beautiful, but the bottom half was a total cakewreck. I saw her smile turned sour but genuinely concerned.

When I realized that she was more concerned with our effort instead of our mistake, I spontaneously said, “Don’t worry, I’ll take your money right now, drive to the nearest cake shop, and buy you another cake.”

Her face lit up, “Sure?”

Within 8 minutes, we had 2 cakes delivered for the price of 1.

Did that customer have repeat orders? She surely had, even with more than 1 referrals.